Find Any File (FAF‪)‬ 4+

I've used this for many months on all my Macs so this is a more considered review than a quick love it or hate it.

I have never got on with the Macs built in search and consider it useless, so have been looking around for a better search for years. Just to be clear "Find Any File" is not it :)

However it's a very specific search tool, which when used in the right way, is very powerful and far superior and easier to use than the mac tools.

Its basically the Unix find command reskinned. However thats no bad thing, I've been using find for over 30 years and I still have to look at the manual when using it for anything beyond simple tasks. It hides the complexity of find and presents everything in a pretty simple and intuitive way.

It doesn't precalculate databases so doesn't take up much space, this is good becuase it means you can do things like check whats changed in the last five minutes and bad because it can take a long time to complete a search. Thats understandable when you think how it works. It has to scan the disk to do what you want for *most* searches.

Its staying on my disk as it does what is supposed to do very well, it doesn't try to be a Spotlight replacement. If you understand how it works (basically understand find), you'll find (pun intended) this to be a valuable and usefull app.

My Excel 2015 just froze (endless color wheel dismay) and I had to force quit. Despite having autorecovery on it hadn’t saved any changes automatically and the file opened without the work of the last 2 hours. I almost puked of anger. I tried all the stuff like “unhide library and look in application support”, googled blogs (turns out I am not the only one being highly frustrated) etc.
Finally found the tip to use this program to find hidden files. Searched for .xls created i last 2h - and voila, it found some cryptic file with the ~ wavy symbol. Double clicking couldn’t open it.
Luckily I remembered reading about changing file type from .xsls to .xslb. Could open, all there, night saved, huuuuge relief.
Bottom line: without this program I would have never found the file.
I first downloaded trial but after it successfully helped me I purchased this versoin to support the author.

Used for years. Spotlight does not always find the file you want, distracts with searching emails, internet etc... Spotlight might find a file but it does not seem to tell you where it is - what pathway to follow. If you cannot remember exactly what the file title was, where you put it - this has a much higher success rate. it also tells you the pathway to find it so that you can move the file if you need to.